Houellebecq: "This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors. I have been influenced especially by [Georges] Perec and [Jorge Luis] Borges..."
It is the author's "style", the publishers said, "to use official statements and sites as literary raw material and include them in his books after, sometimes, lightly amending them. If some appear to have been taken word for word, they are only brief quotations which cannot in any way be considered anything so serious as plagiarism."
